Reddit, like Usenet, or IRC, is just a collection of individual communities that happen to share an identity system. Expecting the (not-logged-in) Reddit front page to be “intellectual discourse” would be like expecting a random selection of Usenet posts or IRC chat-lines to be “intellectual discourse.”
Try just visiting specific Reddit communities, rather than looking askew at the entire menagerie as if there was value there.
Same goes for YouTube: just subscribe to specific channels based on out-of-band recommendations. Or for Twitter, or Netflix, or anything else. These platforms have good things; even curated collections of good things. But you won’t find them by asking the platform to show you something good.
In short: ignore recommendation systems. They are very good at surfacing content that the average “profitable” user that the business targets, wants to see. They are horrible at surfacing the “best” (e.g. highest positive impact on your life for having consumed it) content.
This is very good advice. One of my most upvoted Hacker News comments was saying that creating an account and whitelisting the subreddits you want to read is a tremendous improvement on reddit.
Funny thing to me is that it is really hard to isolate yourself in this way on Twitter. I've spent a lot of time trying to do this but politics always seems to leak through. One thing that has helped is by turning off retweets for as many people as I can.
I've a similar problem on Twitter. I don't follow anyone for their political views, so I typically unfollow as soon as I read some but it's far from an optimal solution.
I resisted setting an account up for years on Reddit, but you're absolutely right - it's the only way to effectively filter things you don't want to see.
Same with Facebook. I usually just unfollow people who frequently post political things, but at the cost of missing out on their posts about their personal lives. I wish there was a "subject" filter that I could use to filter out political posts.
Twitter has one I learned recently, but it's pretty enfeebled. It's as far as I can tell, exact matches only, which sounds fine perhaps in the design phase, but was deeply frustrating in practice. There's a new political candidate in America generating lots of buzz who has several permutations of their name (abbreviations and hyphens were my undoing here), so I ended up having to add several entries just to not hear about politics in a country I don't live in!
Honestly my twitter experience became a lot better once I self imposed a rule to not follow politicians, journalists, and dedicated joke accounts. Now it's mostly fighting game community nerds and anime nerds who spend most of their -- who am I kidding, our -- time making memes and checking to see who's showing up where in terms of cons or tournaments.
You're right about the rage machine. I don't mind the threads. When you follow the right people, it is pretty fun to see how their brain thinks in real time. I love thinking out loud in front of my audience too.
Does anyone know if such functionality exists to disable seeing likes?
I've turned off all retweets for exactly the reasons discussed but twitter still shows me that so and so liked some snarky thing so and si said about So and Se, Candidate from State about current affair.
If I can prune that last bit, my twitter feed just might be saved.
I think Twitter's CEO is trying find ways to break "echo chambers" on twitter. I suspect this is part of the reason we are seeing what other people have liked. I get the reasoning, and maybe it would work, except that the liked tweets are usually the most inflammatory.
Yes: create a "list" on Twitter, add the people you want to that list, and visit just that list (not the main Twitter stream/feed/timeline/whatever). The list does not show likes. (But I haven't tried combining it with disabling retweets...)
if you click the ... on the "so and so liked this tweet" and select "dont show me this", it hides that particular "liked" tweet. Do it enough, and it seems to hide them all. At least it worked for me - I only see original tweets and retweets from those i havent turned off. YMMV
Twitter’s content muring is useless in that it still shows quote Tweets if anyone you mute in your timeline. I have POTUS, Tomi Lahren, and several others blocked and muted, yet they still appear in my timeline because of the infamous “slam dunk quote tweet” phenomenon.
It’s not just hard to filter things out on Twitter; it’s downright impossible.
Try the Fediverse (Mastodon)! It's set up to be less inflammatory because the retweet equivalent doesn't allow embedding your own response. It's also easier to create an isolated island for yourself. Find an instance that aligns with your interests, or do what I'm doing and create your own!
> One of my most upvoted Hacker News comments was saying that creating an account and whitelisting the subreddits you want to read is a tremendous improvement on reddit.
I am surprised this has to be said. It's the same thing with Youtube. Unless you're signed in and have set your own preferences, you will be exposed to the dumpster fire that is mainstream internet content...high schooler humor, conspiracy garbage, superhero movie trailers, etc.
Mastodon has a better workflow for that experience. I find it difficult to find people to follow, but my browsing experience is very stress free day to day.
This may be more work than some are willing to do but I took the opposite approach. I browse /r/all almost exclusively but I've got RES filtering any subreddit I don't want to see in my feed again. The list of filters gets long.
It’s kinda frustrating how recommendation systems on most of these sites are just broken. It recommends popular stuff instead of using this power to help “spread the love”, meaning you end up in a sort of monoculture of popular content.
I think it’s on tic-toc where they try to feature “new stuff” a lot more than just popular things, effectively helping along newer users. I know hello talk tries to do this too.
Popular users and content don’t need help! If these places used their power to point at more hidden gems in their content the entire system would feel healthier
It's funny that you say you think recommendation systems cause a monoculture of content. I actually think that recommenders have lead to less of a monoculture then ever seen before.
It used to be that everyone in a geographic region would read the same newspapers, watch the same news stations, and listen to the same radio stations. Causing people to mostly be exposed to all the same content. However, now with recommendation algorithms everyone gets exposed to a totally different news diet.
While I agree with general stance there is way to avoid these problems. The reason I use reddit much more than Twitter / Instagram is because there are nice open source UI-enhancement projects and clients.
> The degredation of the UI - old.reddit.com won't last forever
I pretty sure Reddit Enhancement Suite will just continue to be developed:
The day old.reddit goes away is the day I stop using reddit, period.
And I'll be sad about it. Smaller subreddits are just about the last bastion of the communities I so enjoyed in the BBS/early internet era. But the new UI is, frankly, a dark-pattern shitshow. And I don't use that term lightly.
Same, I read Reddit a lot on mobile with Apollo but my main usage remains on the desktop - I even pay for gold. The moment they take old.reddit away without some SERIOUS tweaking of the new UI is the moment I cancel gold and leave the site.
Shame too, because there are subreddits I love like /r/homelab.
> The day old.reddit goes away is the day I stop using reddit, period.
Me too! I'll be super happy about it, though. Will break my reddit addiction and principal time sink once and for all. The new design is just so visually disgusting to me I get a palpably negative reaction to it. So cartoony and spaced out, so much less information, even the concise views make everything look like it was obviously designed for mobile and to be like instagram. It's gross. The whole reason I read reddit is for the good discussion and comments. Part of the reason I like HN and craigslist is they're simple and not a visual overload.
The admins have been pretty vocal about not giving up the old design. But I only imagine for long are they willing to they keep the two interfaces up and running?
Reading through all these responses, I have to wonder if there is a business opportunity for a company that provides "best content" recommendations, targeted to your interests, on these platforms.
"But wait, why don't the platforms just do that themselves?!!" I'd argue the economic incentives for the platforms to recommend "brain-candy" lobotomizing content is too high to go against this trend, but a third party with a lot less to lose could actually do a better job at recommending more useful, thoughtful content.
Most people don't share OP opinion, after a long day of work they want to look at cat pictures. Clickbait farms earn more than traditional newspapers, for the simple fact that more people read them.
As for "best content recommendations": The problem is that everyone has a different opinion on what is good content. So the money is in figuring out what you think is good content. Advertising and Social media companies are great at this: they gather as much data on you as they can to figure out what they think you like, and they show you that.
>a third party with a lot less to lose could actually do a better job at recommending more useful, thoughtful content.
That would either cost way too much money, or cause unsustainable immigration into interesting subcultures. Probably both.
I'm always nervous that the one little corner of the internet that I still like for intelligent content is going to fall apart. It's a <1000 person subreddit, a few related slow and/or defunct blogs and a discord group.
I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member. Doubly so if a recommendation system sent me there.
Doesn’t YouTube and social media provide best content recommendations targeted to individuals interests? As far as I can tell, it’s great in theory but leads to echo chambers, people getting lynched, or living completely disconnected from reality.
Great idea in theory, and the people peddling these technologies are even convinced they’re changing the world for the better.
I’m not trying to antagonize you. Good intents lead to hell or something like that.
You are very right: the problem is that our brains are wired so that we prefer content that confirms our beliefs, we stay longer on the platform and are happier (which means advertisers make more money). Platforms have figured this out and are abusing it.
It's so hard to find good content though, on all those platforms.
Twitter for whatever reason takes me forever to find a good set of folks / companies to follow for a given topic... and then they go berserk too and same goes with YouTube, watch something I like for a bit and then that same person starts doing reaction videos and youtube drama stuff ....
The platforms themselves tend to skew the content over time even if you're curating.
Reddit has similar issues, some city based subs I read are regularly spammed by users from other political subs with all sorts of fake news type stuff.
While Reddit is indeed what you make of it and your experience heavily depends on the subs you're visiting, these days I see a lot of subs in decline - subs that are dedicated to niche topics and used to focus on meaningful discussion increasingly turn into a sea of pictures and memes, repeatedly quoting the same inside jokes, asking the same beginners' questions and recommending the same small set of products the community seems to have decided on.
No it's not. Reddit makes it too easy for people to cross between communities and the result is everything trends toward the lowest common denominator. It's the same problem 4Chan has. No matter what you do you're hanging out in the same neighborhood as a bunch of people you probably don't want to hang out with because at the end of the day you still share a site.
Those things are great snippets of cultural discourse, though. The similarities in the things won't might find in a random sampling of Usenet, or IRC, or Reddit will undoubtedly be interesting to academics in the future.
Try just visiting specific Reddit communities, rather than looking askew at the entire menagerie as if there was value there.
Same goes for YouTube: just subscribe to specific channels based on out-of-band recommendations. Or for Twitter, or Netflix, or anything else. These platforms have good things; even curated collections of good things. But you won’t find them by asking the platform to show you something good.
In short: ignore recommendation systems. They are very good at surfacing content that the average “profitable” user that the business targets, wants to see. They are horrible at surfacing the “best” (e.g. highest positive impact on your life for having consumed it) content.